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Fascinating Knowledge of Questionable Value

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For those who have never been involved in sending a close friend or relative off to war, it is hard to imagine the myriad of emotions experienced on a daily basis – a mixture of pride and anguish that will never leave a parent, sibiling, or spouse until their warrior comes home. As a reservist myself, I cringe to think of the effect that a deployment would have on my parents. Fortunately, the culture surrounding military families provides for the single greatest support system that could exist around such a massive organization.

But on this day, we remember those who never came home as well as the families they left behind.

I have always been fascinated by sharks. I must have read the shark Zoobooks at least 100 times as a young’n, and when we would visit family in Hawaii, I would sit and stare with my mouth wide open staring at the sharks at the local aquariums and their massive jagged jaws. The sleek cold beauty of a shark is simply unmatched in nature. Due to the ridiculous excitement over Discovery Channel’s Shark Week every year, I don’t think I am the only one with an affinity for these aquatic dinosaurs. As a result, I think we are all fairly well educated on the crazy biological developments in sharks that make them the ultimate seafaring predator. However, I recently came across one fact that makes sharks even more badass – baby sharks battle it out in the womb to be the chosen one.

On the evening of February 9th, 1913, one of the greatest meteoric events of the modern era occurred when tens of millions of people witnessed dozens of brilliant meteors moving slowly across the sky. Beginning somewhere in western Canada and extending all the way to the Atlantic Ocean just east of Brazil, the meteors followed one after another on an almost identical flight path and extended from horizon to horizon, with individual ones being visible for more than 30 seconds. The entire procession took five full minutes to travel all the way across the sky.

Let’s face it: credit and debit cards are a godsend. They’re safe, convenient, and offer you instant access to either cash in your account or what is basically an instant revolving loan. But few people actually know that there is extra money that changes hands several times just because you paid with plastic. For example, Visa may charge your bank every time you swipe, which in turn charges the merchant a little bit more; some vendors even pass that cost on to the customer, charging a small fee for credit transactions. As it turns out, there are now quite a few laws that regulate this activity, some of which went into effect just days ago. If you aren’t careful, however, some stores will ignore the laws and charge you pretty much whatever and whenever they want. Here’s what you need to know.

Orbiting the sixth planet in our solar system is a lovely little chunk of rock and gas known as Titan. As the largest of Saturn’s 62 moons, Titan has been somewhat of a known quantity for quite a while; in fact, it was discovered in 1655 and is the second-largest moon in our solar system. But it was only recently that we were able to look beyond its dense atmosphere and see what lies beneath – and what lies beneath is, I daresay, awesome.

In the past 100 years, the average life expectancy of a human has nearly doubled. There many factors that have allowed this to happen, such as improvements in sanitation, better knowledge of nutrition, and general advances in medical technology, but one of the largest factors has undoubtedly been our concerted effort to eradicate some of the most deadliest diseases on Earth. To date there have been eight diseases targeted for eradication; two of those programs have been successful, two are ongoing, and the remaining four have been abandoned. But with greater technology and resources being devoted to eradication efforts every day, we could soon live in a disease-free future.

Like many US states, California started out as a republic. It shares a similar history with Texas, in that it was once a holding of the Spanish Empire and then later of Mexico, after which a revolution led to a short life as an independent republic and later a US state. And while its flag displaying a bear and the words “California Republic” is obviously one of the most recognizable in the nation, the Bear Republic could have turned out with a much different, and much more hilarious, name.